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Senator Tries to Run Out the Clock on Immigration

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama likened the immigration bill to mackerel: “The longer it lays in the sun, the more it smells.”Credit
Drew Angerer for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions, an elfin Alabamian with a mischievous smile and a relentless approach to legislative battle, has a theory about the sweeping immigration bill pending in the Senate: It’s as good as dead.

“The longer it lays in the sun, the more it smells, as they say about the mackerel,” said Mr. Sessions, the Republican enthusiastically leading the opposition to a bill others on his side of the aisle see as vital to the very future of the Republican Party.

If that sounds familiar to the immigration rights advocates who have been pressing an overhaul since 2006, it should. “As sunlight falls on the mackerel, it begins to smell more and more,” Mr. Sessions said in 2007 as he successfully waged war on a previous immigration bill, championed by President George W. Bush and pushed forward by his party’s most senior leaders.

In 2006, the dead-mackerel theory played out for the first time as Mr. Sessions helped churn an immigration bill written by the Capitol Hill titans Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John McCain of Arizona into Senate chum.

Advocates of the legislation — Republicans and Democrats — insist this time will be different. The Republican drubbing in November among Latino voters, the shifting demographics of the American electorate, and the rise of telegenic champions of the immigration changes like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, both Republicans, have changed the stakes as well as the political equation.

But in Mr. Sessions, they face an opponent with experience, one who reminds his staff every day that passage of immigration legislation was supposed to be inevitable in 2006 as well, and even more so in 2007. His tactics are the same as they were back then: organize the opposition, break down the bill section by section, raise questions over every aspect of it, slow progress on the floor to a crawl through procedural objections and a flurry of amendments, and hope that in the light of day a conservative backlash will crush final passage.

During the first official week of debate on the Senate floor last week, Senate leaders were able to hold all of one amendment vote — in large measure because of Mr. Sessions’s delaying tactics. “Sessions is taking a full-spectrum view of this bill, and his opposition is not just one section: it’s from Page 1 to Page 1,041,” said Tripp Baird, director of Senate relations at Heritage Action, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s political arm and a vociferous opponent of the immigration bill.

Mr. Sessions does not necessarily hold the same sway in the Senate as the lawmakers he is challenging. The leading champions of the immigration bill include the Senate’s No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Charles E. Schumer of New York, along with a former Republican presidential nominee in Mr. McCain and one of the party’s brightest stars in Mr. Rubio.

Mr. Sessions, the son of a country-store owner from rural Alabama, is neither party leader nor telegenic star. He was elected to the Senate in 1996, a decade after that same body blocked his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to a Federal District Court judgeship amid accusations of racial insensitivity.

His main job at the moment, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has little to do with the task at hand.

What he has is a visceral distaste for a measure that would grant 11 million illegal immigrants a path to United States citizenship, increase the number of legal immigrants allowed in, and reinvigorate guest worker programs across the country.

His motivation, he said, is simple: Other Republicans are too scared to take the lead, fearing they will be labeled anti-immigrant, intolerant or worse. It has fallen to him again.

“People want to vote for something. I mean that makes you feel good. You want to fix the problem,” Mr. Sessions said, “but we’ve been hijacked by legislation that won’t work.”

He has been indefatigable in speaking, lecturing and hectoring on the bill for hours on end, first in the Senate Judiciary Committee as the panel drafted the bill and now on the Senate floor. Where other critics of the legislation say they want to “improve” it, Mr. Sessions has no qualms about expressing his goal: slaying the beast.

His amendments have been pointed and controversial. Last month, a proposal in the Judiciary Committee to limit the flow of legal immigrants lost 17 to 1.

He has courted law enforcement groups, immigrations and customs unions, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and obscure organizations like the Black American Leadership Alliance, trying to rally an opposition.

He has largely kept his language in check. Gone are statements like the one in a May 2006 floor speech, when he declared, “Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming because they have a skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society.”

To allies, his motives are clear. The legislation pushes all his buttons. A law-and-order prosecutor and former United States attorney, Mr. Sessions views a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants as a fundamental breach of the rule of law. A political populist who has railed against Chinese currency manipulation, he says an influx of guest workers and new immigrants will depress wages and harm the job prospects of embattled American workers. And as a longtime critic of what he sees as a growing welfare state, he insists the legislation will expand an underclass dependent on the government and the taxpayer.

“Jeff is the same Eagle Scout he was growing up in Wilcox County, Alabama,” said Representative Jo Bonner, Republican of Alabama, who represents Mr. Sessions’s hometown. “He believes in the Constitution, and he believes in the rule of law.”

Others see something else at work. Alabama’s Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act of 2011 was perhaps the strictest of a wave of tough, anti-illegal-immigration bills passed in the South and West. Bill Armistead, chairman of the Republican Party of Alabama, said that back home, there is no great rush to change positions on immigration to curry favor with Latino voters.

“The feeling in Alabama is, if you’re here, you ought to be legal, and if you’re illegal, you ought to make arrangements to be somewhere other than Alabama or anywhere else in the country for that matter,” he said.

In such sentiments lie Mr. Sessions’s motivations, said Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois, who has been pressing for comprehensive immigration legislation as long as Mr. Sessions has been fighting it.

“Those are his origins. He’s a reflection of home,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

Proponents of the Senate bill say Mr. Sessions’s dead-mackerel strategy will not work this time. Mr. Rubio’s courtship of conservative talk radio has so far muted the backlash that doomed the 2007 bill. Proponents are unified enough to keep the Sessions amendment barrage from gumming up the bill and making it collapse of its own weight.

The news climate is also different. By coincidence, the immigration bill has largely been kept off the front pages and nightly news by a stream of other events: the Boston Marathon bombing, the Internal Revenue Service scandal, National Security Agency surveillance and others. Conservative activists have trained their fire on the I.R.S. and the Obama administration’s handling of the attack in Benghazi, Libya.

But in the end, proponents say, times have simply changed on Mr. Sessions. “For me, Sessions is there because he represents a discredited immigration philosophy, but his plan was put up Nov. 6 to the voters, and it lost,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

Mr. Sessions is not so sure. “I don’t think it’s a done deal,” he said.“Public confidence will continue to erode, and it could find itself in trouble quicker than you think.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: In Round 3, Immigration Bill Faces Senate Opponent Who Won Rounds 1 and 2. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe